How Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers Saved the Franchise or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Shape
Halloween Ends released in theaters on October 14th 2022 serving as the culmination of the latest trilogy of films starring Jamie Lee Curtis. The now 46-year-old franchise includes 13 installments garnering consistent financial success, an ever growing fan base, and a merchandise empire that is certainly nothing to sneeze at. Contrary to the title of this final showdown between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers, Halloween will not be ending anytime soon. The franchise will endure and go on to new interpretations from new creative minds finding new ways for Michael to stalk, slice, and strangle for many years to come much to the delight of slasher film fans the world over. But it almost didn’t happen.
Halloween 3: What Ever Happened to the Boy from Haddonfield?
Where was Michael Myers? Where was Dr. Loomis? What happened to Laurie? Was Haddonfield ever the same again after the night he came home? Halloween 3: Season of the Witch wasn’t interested in answering any of these questions. With this installment, John Carpenter, Debra Hill, and Tommy Lee Wallace hoped to establish a new anthology series always taking place at Halloween, but always involving new characters and new storylines, rather than the same old movie with the same old mask and a new number tacked on to the title. The noble experiment sadly fell flat on its face. In 1982, this is simply not what people wanted from a movie called Halloween 3. The words “deeply flawed” and “jumbled mess” were just some of the ways that film critics across the nation described this unexpected journey with Tom Atkins drinking and aardvarking his way to the bottom of a terrifying mystery. The series was dropped by Universal Pictures for any future distribution, John Carpenter and Debra Hill washed their hands of the franchise, and a new sequel in the Halloween saga would not be greenlit for another six years. Whatever came next needed to hit, and it needed to hit big.
You Can’t Kill the Boogeyman
Syrian filmmaker and franchise lightkeeper Moustapha Akkad waited until the 80s were nearly over to bring Michael back to the big screen, and it wasn’t until the right director with the right script came along that he was ready to take another chance on The Shape. “Halloween 3 was a good movie, but not exactly good for the franchise,” Akkad said in an interview. He’s quite humble about his role in making Halloween what it became, and insists that all he really did was preserve the franchise, always making sure to keep it about Michael. “My favorite is number 4, of course.” On the strength of a film called Blood Stone released in India, Moustapha took a pitch meeting with its director Dwight Little. They had both attended USC film school and spoke a similar language in their approach to filmmaking. After a successful sit-down, Little was given the go ahead to proceed with his take on Halloween 4. If done right, this would resurrect Michael Myers as well as the Halloween franchise just in time for the 10-year anniversary of the classic that started it all. Moustapha’s only hardline directive to Little was to bring Michael back. Not in some ethereal ghostlike way, but for real. The mask had to be right, the actor had to look right in costume, and don’t forget the head tilt.
Little brought in his writing partner Alan McElroy to get started on the script. There wasn’t much time due to the fact that the Writer’s Guild of America was about to strike, and no work could be done on the script once the strike began. McElroy was able to come up with a proper story and write the film’s script in only 11 days, beating the start of the writer’s strike by mere hours. With the script in working order, pre-production was able to get underway.
It Takes a Village
It was important to both Little and McElroy to focus on Haddonfield as a character, the ways in which the trauma of Michael affected the town, and how Haddonfield reacted to his return. Producer Paul Freeman decided the picture should be shot in Utah because there was a wealth of local talent they could cast, an abundance of tax incentives to take advantage of, and far fewer labor regulations than in California. This was a welcome choice for Little as he grew up outside Cleveland, and had a strong feel for the midwestern mindset. The timing of the shoot was less ideal occurring during April and May, so leaves had to be brought in to dress the locations in addition to oversized squashes which had to be painted orange since there were no ripe pumpkins available. Little used all of this to great effect, bringing a post-harvest tone to the proceedings during the slow atmospheric opening credits which perfectly evoke the mood of Halloween the holiday before bringing Michael back into Halloween the film. Every scene was shot in an actual house or building in and around Salt Lake City. They used no sound stages, only real life locations giving the film a tactile, lived-in quality that would be near impossible to fake. They also attached yellow gels to the headlights on each car used in the movie to give them more of an autumnal golden glow rather than their usual stark white. Although they did want to honor the original and include subtle echoes to John Carpenter’s classic, they did not want to become preoccupied with filling in every logic hole created by part 2, nor did they feel obligated to reinvent the wheel. Little remarked in his commentary track that the film becomes almost a kind of western as Haddonfield is cut off from the outside world once Michael destroys Bucky’s Power Station plunging the small town into total darkness. This combined with his utter decimation of the police station leaves new sheriff Ed Meeker (played by Beau Starr, who somehow becomes my favorite new player in Haddonfield) without an adequate police force to combat the dark threat that has descended upon his town. Micheal is a specter they thought they had banished to Hell for good, but he has come back.
It truly seems as if Michael could be anywhere and is somehow everywhere, depicted magnificently in the scene where a few local teens dress as Michael in jest and surround a crime scene before nearly being shot by Loomis and the beleaguered sheriff. The teens run off unharmed, ripping their masks off and laughing, but this desperate situation combined with memories of Michael’s assault from 10 years ago prompts Earl the bar owner (given more grace than the script really demanded by actor Gene Ross) to raise a posse and tear ass through the streets of Haddonfield, determined to hunt down and slay Myers once and for all. Little’s big goal for the film was to establish and assert a real down-to-earth atmosphere, populating the town with characters (not just archetypes) that the audience could actually get to know and come to care for. The horror would ideally come from having an emotional stake in their journey through this nightmare. It was never meant to be a collection of pretty teens for Michael to slice, dice, and display only to horrify whichever survivor he simply hadn’t gotten to yet. Every decision made was geared toward reinvention and escalation. Halloween 1978 was slow, methodical, and filled with dread. The Return of Michael Myers proved to be bigger, daring, and more goddamn fun.
Bigger, Daring, and More Fun
“Make it oddly intense.” This was the key directing note given to Raymond O’Connor for the elevator exposition sequence at the start of the film. He was responsible for recapping every important plot point from the first two installments and firmly establishing the tone and mood of the flick. It’s creepy, but still funny. His performance is oafish, but somehow still unsettling. It gets things off on exactly the right foot, cutting to that gorgeous raking shot of Michael being pushed on a gurney through the rain as the classic Halloween theme fills the speakers reassuring all those watching that they are in safe hands. The carnage continues as Michael (upon hearing that he has a niece out there with the audacity to still be alive) awakens from his decade-long coma to attack the paramedics transporting him while the ambulance is still in motion. The now infamous thumb-kill was added late in the shoot (courtesy of special effects makeup artist John Carl Buechler) to up the stakes, and convince the audience that anything could happen. The team certainly stuck to this principle. In 1978’s Halloween, Michael gets his iconic coveralls from an offscreen kill discovered by Loomis before moving on to Haddonfield. The Return takes a similar approach, but includes an encounter between Loomis and Michael which shows the death and destruction he’s recently dealt out at a small diner adjoining an auto body shop. It utilizes the push & pull Vertigo-shot made famous in Jaws revealing a standoff between these two titans. It then shows Michael crashing a truck through a garage door, only nearly missing Loomis, and triggering a substantial car explosion. In John Carpenter’s original, Michael is on top of a parked car, and smashes his hand into the passenger window, frightening Marion Chambers and stealing the car. In The Return, he is on top of a moving truck, smashes his hand through the driver’s window, and proceeds to rip the throat out of poor Earl with one bare hand. The finale of part 1 takes place in a simple suburban house. The climax of part 4 involves a non-stop nail-biting chase sequence that moves through the Meeker residence, up to its roof, off to a nearby schoolhouse, and finally on top of a moving truck which careens off the highway shaking Michael loose before Rachel hits him with said truck, sending his body sailing through the air and into the local cemetery. Halloween’s first film concludes with Dr. Loomis shooting Michael six times and having him fall from a 2nd story window. For this flick, the beer belly brigade led by Sheriff Meeker pump round after round into Michael from an array of shotguns, pistols, and rifles before he drops with a thud into the open grave conveniently located behind him. Everything is taken up a notch in The Return. Not in a thoughtless Michael Bay sort of way, but in a way which was grounded and still connected enough to the character of Haddonfield and the citizens living there to still seem plausible within the established world of the film. But one must remember, this was 1988. From one perspective, Halloween was a victim of its own success. The box office boom from The Shape’s first outing inspired many also-ran copycats as well as several standout badass baddies that had filled the gap left in multiplexes during Michael’s six year hiatus. There was no shortage of frightful franchise freaks for film fans to fawn over at this point in the 80s, so the movie couldn’t just be good. It had to also distinguish itself among these other slasher successes.
Don’t Get Lost in the Crowd
1988 was a banner year for horror releases, bringing heavy hitting competition to the now six-year dormant Halloween franchise. In addition to grappling with its own legacy, The Return also had to contend with Freddy 4, Jason 7, Hellraiser 2, Child’s Play 1, Poltergeist 3,Pumpkinhead 1, Return of the Living Dead 2, Maniac Cop 1, Brain Damage, They Live, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark just to name a few. Not to say these were all in theaters at the same time competing for the same butts-in-seats, but it paints a clearer picture as to just how cluttered the viewing menu had become with blood, breasts, and beasts for the eyes of mutants young and old to feast upon. Michael couldn’t just return. He had to explode back onto cinema screens with a vengeance giving fright-fans something they couldn’t get anywhere else. This could not be a disposable collection of characters in their teens being played by actors in their 20’s, stripping down and getting fileted by a stunt man in a mask. The Return gave us a smaller cast of characters we could relate to. The sisterhood between Jamie and Rachel is the lynchpin locking us into their struggle. Little said during his commentary track, that The Return was meant to be more about the family, the small town, and the two protectors (Loomis and Meeker) attempting to safeguard them from an encroaching danger. Yes, there is a love triangle, but it is made up of the only teenage characters of any note in the film, and they all have names you can actually remember. Kelly is not a craven witch, nor is Brady a thoughtless knob only out to get his rocks off. They actually give their lives trying to protect Rachel and Jamie from The Shape after he’s snuck into the Meeker household. Okay, Brady gave his life to protect the girls. Kelly was protecting a tray of instant coffee, but at least she was contributing!
Other franchise favorites like Freddy or Jason were the ones the audiences rooted for by their median installments, but Michael Myers was still the one they feared. Nancy Thompson had only shown up twice at this point in the Nightmare series, and Tommy Jarvis saw his trilogy come and go (played by three different actors, no less), but Dr. Loomis was always there, anchoring the material with the kind of legitimacy that only a seasoned veteran of stage and screen brings with him. He was always game for whatever new twist or turn the story might take, and always gave 100% passion in every scene until the man literally had no more breath within him. This wasn’t only the return of Michael Myers. It was also the return of Donald Pleasance, and Dr. Loomis was one of a kind.
No discussion about how The Return stands out among its peers could be put to rest without addressing the ending. Upon reflection, one must concede that the endings of Halloween parts 1, 2, and 3 were all phenomenal. The Return had an obligation to measure up to its predecessors and it did not disappoint. “Michael Myers is in Hell now. Buried. Where he belongs,” Dr. Loomis tells the family as they settle in for a much earned denouement. All seems like happily ever after until a new POV killing (echoing the opening moments of part 1) reveals that Jamie is now the killer! Has the spirit of Michael Myers somehow possessed her? Was Michael Myers himself only ever a human host for a kill-crazy demon that has just now found its new home? Is Loomis really about to shoot a 7-year-old girl? The horror on his face as well as his screams of terror at the sight of a blood-soaked Jamie in a clown costume, breathing just like Michael as the score intensifies and the credits roll was a stupendous way to wrap the film. Audiences were floored. All they knew for sure was that the nightmare was not over. The killing would continue. Whether in the form of a sweet little girl or somehow rising once more as the classic Shape: Michael Myers had returned.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers smashed its way into theaters on October 21st and held the number one spot at the box office for two weeks straight. The film tripled its budget in box office returns, and while critics were mostly mixed on the affair, the fans were fed, delighted, and hungry for more. Plans began immediately for Halloween 5, and Moustapha asked Dwight Little and Alan McElory to come back and work their magic once again. They sadly had to pass on the job for both scheduling and personal reasons. Little felt things had gone so well with part 4, he may as well leave a good thing alone, and let someone else take the helm moving forward. McElory didn’t learn that they’d decided to chuck the idea of Jamie being the new killer until he saw Halloween 5 in theaters. It was a big disappointment for him. Danielle Harris was also sad that she didn’t get to pick up the knife for part 5, stating in her commentary track, “I really wanted to come back as the killer. That would’ve been so scary. I don’t know why they didn’t follow up with that.” According to Malek Akkad, who has followed in his father’s footsteps as executive producer and lightkeeper of the Halloween franchise, “It was never for her to take over for Michael Myers in that way.”
The only bad taste left in one’s mouth when looking back on this monumental installment is the knowledge that it began The Thorn Trilogy. A head-scratching, convoluted can of worms that I’d need another couple pots of coffee and a full ounce of Purple Haze to properly parse out. Standing alone however, The Return is easily one of the finest outings for Michael Myers ever set to film. It was one of the best horror releases in a year jam packed with excellent horror releases, and it corrected the course of the franchise catapulting it to a longstanding spot in the Horror Hall of Fame.
David Gordon Green finished his recent Myers trilogy with a divisive installment titled Halloween Ends. A bold and misleading moniker to be sure. It is thanks in no small part to Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, and all the good will it earned the franchise, that Halloween will not be ending anytime soon. You can be sure of it. Sure as breasts and blue suede shoes!
